Identity Season
Identity - growing up
As a parent have you ever caught your children fighting? If you have, then did one child accuse the other of starting it? and did the other accuse the first of stealing a toy or something similar? Like many parents, probably you would have taken the toy away from them and said they could have it back only when they had learned to play together happily again!
As parents and adults we want to teach our children to get along with each other, not to grab what is somebody else’s and definitely not to fight. When I was thinking about this I was reminded of Solomon, a prophet who was bestowed with a divine gift of wisdom. The story that came to mind was this:
‘Two prostitutes came to the king to have an argument settled. “Please, my lord,” one of them began, “this woman and I live in the same house. I gave birth to a baby while she was with me in the house. Three days later this woman also had a baby. We were alone; there were only two of us in the house.
“But her baby died during the night when she rolled over on it. Then she got up in the night and took my son from beside me while I was asleep. She laid her dead child in my arms and took mine to sleep beside her. And in the morning when I tried to nurse my son, he was dead! But when I looked more closely in the morning light, I saw that it wasn’t my son at all.”
Then the other woman interrupted, “It certainly was your son, and the living child is mine.”
“No,” the first woman said, “the living child is mine, and the dead one is yours.” And so they argued back and forth before the king.
Then the king said, “Let’s get the facts straight. Both of you claim the living child is yours, and each says that the dead one belongs to the other. All right, bring me a sword.” So a sword was brought to the king.
Then he said, “Cut the living child in two, and give half to one woman and half to the other!”
Then the woman who was the real mother of the living child, and who loved him very much, cried out, “Oh no, my lord! Give her the child—please do not kill him!”
But the other woman said, “All right, he will be neither yours nor mine; divide him between us!”
Then the king said, “Do not kill the child, but give him to the woman who wants him to live, for she is his mother!”
When all Israel heard the king’s decision, the people were in awe of the king, for they saw the wisdom God had given him for rendering justice.’ (1 Kings 3:16–28)
Many of the fights as adults mirror fights as children. Yes, there are a few really bad people in the world but not many, and none of them are probably reading Uncle Aziz thoughts. Of course, we all have a little bit of bad in us, but most of us do not let it turn us into aggressive, heartless people. Instead we take a normal, reasonable approach to life most of the time. All we want is to stick with the same default settings all humans are born with—the ordinary desires to manage our own lives, escape pain and enjoy the things we want to enjoy.
The so-called grown-up approach to life has adult levels of suspicion and self-defence, but as we all know, it isn’t perfect. It involves inflicting pain in order to teach other people not to inflict pain on us. Sometimes this fails or even backfires.
We retaliate to teach people a lesson, but they are such slow learners. Oppressors don’t want to learn they are oppressive. Racists don’t want to stop denying their racism. Prisoners can all tell us why they don’t belong in prison. When ordinary people occasionally act like bad people, they usually find an excuse for it.
If we retaliate against people when they don’t think they did anything wrong, they think we are the Dagger people. We know they are wildly misjudging us and our motives because all we are doing is self-defence. When we remind them that they deserved our retaliation, they get even more upset with us. This goes into a downward spiral of accusation and counter-accusation and it produces the world as we know it.
But Christ said something that is really strange: ‘If you try to hang on to your life, you will lose it. But if you give up your life for my sake, you will save it.’ (Luke 9:24)
The life we lose is the unaffected life, the one we just described as the ‘grown-up’ life, each looking out for our own welfare as best we can and using as much self-defence as necessary. To give up that life for the sake of the Messiah means to get connected to the main thing he was always talking about—his call to join him and his band of pilgrims travelling from our old life to our new one. That is what the Messianic Pilgrimage is all about.